Thursday, August 22, 2013

Links

Judith Curry points out that “motivated reasoning” also applies to believers (to which I would add, yes, double-yes, and more-so — follow that money). When grants, careers, junkets, book sales, and offers to sit on golden-commissions are on the line, it doesn’t take much motivated reasoning to find excuses to believe your work is “science” even as you ignore opportunities to follow data that doesn’t quite fit, or delay publications of inconvenient graphs, while you double check, triple check, and invite like-minded colleagues to help find reasons the graphs are not important.

Some scientists are so motivated that they call opposing scientists petty names, and toss allusions they must be “funded” by vested interests, even as they ignore the billions of vested interests funding the name-callers. Meanwhile, all the silent so-called scientists in the tea-rooms that let the one-sided insults go unopposed are complicit in the steady corruption of a once noble profession.

There are an estimated 146 million yellow perch in Lake Erie this year, according to a Great Lakes Fishery Commission report published in March. That’s down from an estimated 315 million in 1987, but it’s also up from 41 million in 1993. [Looking at those numbers, I'm unconvinced that CO2 is the thermostat that controls perch populations in Lake Erie.]

OTTAWA — Even as it was cancelling a popular federal incentive program that helped Canadian households retrofit their homes and save on energy costs, the Harper government says on its climate change website that it spent $240,000 to “transfer” the program to Japan.